WASHINGTON — A federal choose in Arizona dominated Thursday that the Home choose committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol can see the cellphone data of Arizona Republican Get together Chairwoman Kelli Ward and her husband.
U.S. District Court docket Choose Diane J. Humetewa rejected the Wards’ arguments in a February lawsuit that the congressional panel ought to be prevented from getting the cellphone data of the couple, who’re medical doctors, as a result of it might violate medical privateness legal guidelines.
In January, the state GOP chair and her husband, Michael Ward, had been amongst 14 of 84 so-called alternate electors subpoenaed by the committee as a result of they’d claimed in bogus paperwork that then-President Donald Trump had gained the 2020 election of their states.
The choose wrote in her 18-page submitting Thursday that the Home committee’s info request “pertains to cellphone calls data from November 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021, from an account related to a Republican nominee to function elector for former President Trump.”
“That three-month interval is plainly related to its investigation into the causes of the January sixth assault,” she wrote. “The court docket due to this fact has little doubt concluding these data could help the choose committee’s legitimate legislative objective.”
Humetewa additionally dismissed the Wards’ arguments that the subpoena searching for their cellphone data violate their First and 14th Modification rights and that releasing the data would danger that these the couple had contacted through the interval may very well be “implicated within the largest felony investigation in U.S. historical past.”
The choose additionally rejected the plaintiffs’ assertion that the subpoena would lead to harassment, just like the demise threats they’d beforehand obtained, as a result of these “incidents have already occurred.”
The Division of Justice, in the meantime, has additionally been investigating the “faux electors.” The Jan. 6 committee, which is predicted to carry what may very well be its last listening to Sept. 28, has compelled a lot of them to testify, alleging they had been a part of the broader scheme by Trump and his allies to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election.
